We purchased hardware components in order to upgrade an older L1500 to
an L3000 (new CPU's, memory carrier, motherboard, disk drive backplane,
pci IO board, new sheet metal, etc. etc.), which is something I haven't
had to do before. After the meticulous hardware swapping, the server was
rendered unbootable with software errors. After replacing all the old
equipment and booting successfully, we saw that the hardware enablement
patches were so old (June 2001) it would not support this hardware
upgrade. The documentation states Sep. 2001 is the absolute earliest
hardware enablement release which supports this particular upgrade. Big
mistake for not checking on this ahead of time.

Well we then performed the Sep. 2003 HW enablement patch update, but
booting back into the OS was again unsuccessful, with Software Level
Alerts in the GSP error log such as these before it forced reboot:

I had to boot to the old vmunix.prev kernel and uninstall the HW
Enablement bundle in order to make the server bootable again.

Why would the HW enablement bundle cause the kernel to be unbootable?
Does something else need updating first on this old system? Another
patch bundle before the HW Enablement patch bundle? Is a system firmware
update or GSP firmware update necessary first of all? Is there a
document that more fully explains the sequence of updates neccessary?
It's difficult to keep doing the trial and error method when all we have
are after hours for server downtime.

The system's Firmware Version is 41.39, GSP Firmware Revision is A.01.06

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